Writing That Quotes

#1. Sometimes writing is like talking to a stranger who's exactly like yourself in every possible way, only to realize that this stranger is as boring as shit.

Chuck Klosterman

#2. Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

Gore Vidal

#3. Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.

Ray Bradbury

#4. (The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I'm writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I'm an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.

Augusten Burroughs

#5. We all gotta die, and we all gotta live with the things our dark sides do. People are afraid of their darkness, though. Spend their whole lives so scared of dyin' that they never get to live. Spend their whole lives pushin' down that darkness, until there ain't no light at all.

Suzanne Palmieri

#6. After the Beatles and Dylan, there's this assumption that you are a singer-songwriter, or that if someone else is writing your rhymes, you're a fake rapper.

Alan Light

#7. The public has no idea that writing is a disease, and that the writer who publishes is like a beggar who exhibits his sores.

Michael Kruger

#8. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.

Jane Yolen

#9. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

Lily King

#10. I guess that in a lot of ways, my writing is more of a character to me than something that I feel personally attached to.

Angel Olsen

#11. Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

Sara Sheridan

#12. Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Julian Barnes

#13. I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#14. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

Stephen King

#15. There always had to be a survivor. Maybe this simply spoke to the optimism of the men writing those screenplays; even with an uncomfortable sci fi plot they had to subconsciously comfort themselves by thinking that at least a hundred people would survive.
Someone has to survive

Chris Dietzel

#16. I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.

Claudia Rankine

#17. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

Carl Sagan

#18. I'm also always thinking about the score as a recording, as opposed to a performance that can be recreated in a live environment. Some of what I write could of course be played in a concert hall, but for the needs of a film I don't consider that.

Geoff Zanelli

#19. When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.

Michael Longley

#20. I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.

P.G. Wodehouse

#21. All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.

Jesse Kellerman

#22. Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting.

George Saunders

#23. It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

Isadora Duncan

#24. It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

Gerald Brenan

#25. Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame -or one that is conducive to loving-kindness.

Pema Chodron

#26. Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

Bret Easton Ellis

#27. Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

John Wayne

#28. The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.

Tony Kushner

#29. If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.

David Benioff

#30. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

Paul Auster

#31. Writing a song doesn't heal things. Even if the song comes up with a solution, it's still only a theory. Going out and living my lyrics is a whole other deal. That takes courage.

Alanis Morissette

#32. That's not writing, that's typing.

Truman Capote

#33. People talk differently. You can say some things some places you can't say in other places. But me as a film maker, no words are ever going to be off limits in something I write. As long as people use the words, I'm going to report that.

Dax Shepard

#34. Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real?

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#35. Today when I begin writing I'm aware: something that I don't understand drives this engine.

Donald Hall

#36. I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?

Anne Lamott

#37. I still get enormous pleasure and a sense of fulfillment out of writing a book that I'm proud of. I see myself as a bit like a jewel-maker who can sit back and admire his work.

Wilbur Smith

#38. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

Ernest Cline

#39. I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.

Neale Donald Walsch

#40. I've been writing a lot of country music again. I've written some bluegrass material. I'm having a good time doing that.

Dan Fogelberg

#41. It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.

Tim Cahill

#42. Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.

Christy Hall

#43. I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

Octavia Butler

#44. I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit.

Robert Rankin

#45. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!

Mary Gordon

#46. And here I sit, writing about him as though he's just a ghost from my past that still haunts me. And I guess that is all he is now. Just some guy I used to know.

Dawn Kurtagich

#47. E-mail creates the illusion that you're writing. You're not.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

#48. All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.

Carl Jung

#49. You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

David Foster Wallace

#50. Instead of noting down things I'm unlikely to forget, I will write a poem. Even if I have never written one before and even if I never do so again, I will at least know that I once had the courage to put my feelings into words.

Paulo Coelho

#51. The danger in writing about a world you don't know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes I'll end up with a hundred pages I don't know what to do with.

Dan Chaon

#52. I like to write about people who are real and likeable. I like to write about people who tell their stories in that close and intimate voice we use with best friends. I love the closeness and honesty and vulnerability that come from characters who can talk that way.

Katherine Center

#53. No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing.

J.K. Rowling

#54. In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Rose Tremain

#55. When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#56. Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.

Caroline Kennedy

#57. Spend sunny afternoons writing. Take weekends in the country. Dream. Drink good wine, eat fabulous cheese and great bread. Make the kind of love that destroys the bed.

Rachel Hauck

#58. I'm totally active. I am just this side of hyper. I jog and go to the gym every day. When I'm on the computer, I'm reading, I'm writing, I'm never quiet. My brain is very rarely not engaged. Every now and again I will fall asleep under the parasol in the sun, but that's a rarity.

Suzi Quatro

#59. I started writing because I found I could spend more time in my own imagination by doing that than I could by reading.

Geraldine McCaughrean

#60. I didn't want to be a big record mogul and all that stuff. I just wanted to write songs and make people laugh.

Berry Gordy

#61. Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do.

Criss Jami

#62. Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.

Peter Drucker

#63. If we fulfill our responsibility to the Constitution, the Supreme Court will be filled with superior legal minds who will pursue the one agenda that our founding fathers intended in writing the Constitution: justice, rather than political or personal goals.

Chuck Grassley

#64. It took a while to find a passion for another career that was as strong as the passion that I had for football. Once I found it in acting, it was simple. Use the tools you were given from playing football and apply it to your new passion. I have done that through acting, producing and writing.

Maurice Hall

#65. Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.

Fennel Hudson

#66. There's always a latent or inferred image in my writing. And I can almost always assume if I do a drawing that it will eventually have text.

Raymond Pettibon

#67. [I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

Betsy Lerner

#68. I think my writing was certainly shaped from having lived in a place like Niverville as well as by the family that I came from, the religion that I had, that type of thing.

David Bergen

#69. Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:
1. Write a simple narrative.
2. Make a long list.
3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.

Jaclyn Moriarty

#70. I suppose more than anything, it's the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.

Nicholas Sparks

#71. I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

Mark Twain

#72. I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.

Gail Carriger

#73. My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Anthony Doerr

#74. You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.

Ralph Fletcher

#75. I'm very rigid about my schedule. I sit down at 8 A.M., and the Internet blocker goes on. My standard time is 120 minutes. I'm a compulsive writer, so it reminds me to stop writing ... If I write more than that, I turn into an ogre for my kids.

Claire Cameron

#76. The assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form.

John Scalzi

#77. Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

Margaret Atwood

#78. If I come across an issue, or something I feel strongly about, and I happen to think of a song that would go in that direction, then I do it. But that's not what I start out, necessarily, to do. Sometimes I may have an idea for a song - Well, I'm going to write about a thing.

Charlie Daniels

#79. You could do a 'Les Mis'-type musical about Hamilton, but it would have to be 12 hours long, because the amount of words on the bars when you're writing a typical song - that's maybe got 10 words per line.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

#80. If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make your dreams come true.

Nancy Pickard

#81. I was writing my Ph.D. in the late 1980s and was keeping an eye on what was happening in the world. It became obvious to me that Russia couldn't live without computers. I think I worked this out a year before anyone else. I started looking for people who could help import them.

Bidzina Ivanishvili

#82. If you want to be a rock star, you're not going to just walk on stage. You gotta go practice in the garage until your fingers bleed. I always say that - the same with writing and the same with filmmaking - if it's really your passion, you've just got to stick with it and do it.

Robert Rodriguez

#83. I write because that is what I am supposed to do.

Christy Hall

#84. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

Anthony Trollope

#85. I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.

Junot Diaz

#86. I would imagine that most of my writing is done spontaneously. I had no intention of writing, and then I'll just walk through the house, and I'll hear this melody, and I'll turn on the tape players and go back to it later on. Some days I'll get 3-5 songs a day.

Andrae Crouch

#87. I certainly wouldn't be writing books if it hadn't been for the feminist blogosphere, and I think that's a really amazing thing.

Jessica Valenti

#88. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#89. Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Mordecai Richler

#90. efforts demonstrated that he had little facility for writing propaganda or even for communicating with a broad audience. No rejoinder was more learned than his treatises, but none was so unreadable.

John Ferling

#91. I've found for the last couple of years that the things that I can become most deeply involved with are songs that reflect my real feelings about things and so that what I've been writing about.

Neil Diamond

#92. Semi-facetiously, when people ask me why I write these kinds of stories, I simply say that I was warped as a child. And, there is some truth to that.

Stephen King

#93. I think 'Cool Hand Luke' was probably the first movie in which I was aware of the writing as its own separate thing. It was that speech when the guy reads Paul Newman the riot act. The speech about going in the box.

Brian Helgeland

#94. I have learned one lesson as a writer ... keep writing and never throw any notes away. Written parts that can't be used today ... may be used for other books tomorrow.

Timothy Pina

#95. It's not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources. If you were to write something now, I bet there's a pretty good chance you'd call on your teenage years, your experiences then, stuff you learned then.

Paul McCartney

#96. The openness of such networked devices reflects our growing desire to construct writing in a way that breaks down the traditional distinctions between the book and such larger forms as the encyclopedia and the library.

Jay David Bolter

#97. Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.

Teju Cole

#98. When I as reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet.

Deborah Lawrenson

#99. It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.

Katie Roiphe

#100. Writing is a lot like life, the more you learn the more you realize that you don't have a clue

Carl Henegan